Quote

Seek simplicity, and distrust it.

Alfred North Whitehead

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alfred North Whitehead
Age: 86 †
Born: 1861
Born: February 15
Died: 1947
Died: December 30
Mathematician
Philosopher
Physicist
Theologian
Writer
Ramsgate
Kent
Simplicity
Seek
Creativity
Science
Distrust
Mathematical

More quotes by Alfred North Whitehead

Image
There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty in our present society .
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Above all things we must be aware of what I will call 'inert ideas' - that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
The consequences of a plethora of half-digested theoretical knowledge are deplorable.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Religion is what a person does in his solitariness.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.
Alfred North Whitehead
Image
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.
Alfred North Whitehead